


clean

by bastaerd



Series: all well [2]
Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: -adjacent at any rate, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, Bathing/Washing, Comfort No Hurt, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, a little bit of both! no god no rules just right!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-18
Updated: 2020-07-18
Packaged: 2021-03-05 01:01:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,692
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25355905
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bastaerd/pseuds/bastaerd
Summary: There’s a knock at the bathroom door, and Harry gets to his feet and opens it. There stands Henry in the doorway, wearing just a pair of pajama pants and rubbing his eyes blearily.“You didn’t wake me,” Henry assures him before he can even start to apologize. “Just woke up, myself. When I heard the shower going, I thought I might tell you welcome home.”He finishes scrubbing at his face, giving Harry a sheepish once-over.“Suppose I should’ve given you more time.”
Relationships: Henry Collins/Harry D. S. Goodsir
Series: all well [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1839514
Comments: 5
Kudos: 26





	clean

Over the years, Harry has grown to find comfort in the strangeness of his schedule. Shifts are days long over the course of a week, rather than a handful of hours per day, stretching his waking time into a waxing and waning wave of sunlight and moonlight. He catches snatches of sleep during those shifts, enough to have him alert and ready when next he is needed, but invariably collapses onto the bed after he returns home and has had a good, long shower. It takes him longer to fall asleep there than it does when he’s on shift, where he can all but put himself out like a candle.

He finally arrives back home in the early hours of the morning, the air refreshingly cool against his face in a way that helps stave off the exhaustion that has had time to build over the course of the drive home. It lasts until he lets himself in and closes the door behind himself as quietly as he can, and then, it’s all he can do to make sure his bones support him through the living room, where he deposits his bag on the chair nearest the door, and down the hall to the bathroom. When he starts the water, the long hours at work pull his shoulders into a slump, and he has to sit on the lid of the toilet so that he can rub some life back into his face as wisps of steam begin to fill the room. The water bill would suffer for the length of his showers, he knows, if he treated them as anything but the luxury they are to him. Besides, on the days he doesn’t spend riding around in an ambulance, he keeps it to a utilitarian scrub to make sure he is clean.

Only then does it fully register how long his working hours are, cut by the occasional nap, but all that does is keep him a puppet bouncing on an often-tugged string. Sleep is seldom restful-- Harry would be surprised if his eyes even fully close-- but that doesn’t matter until he comes home and is allowed the chance and the comfort to lay down and be carried away. Though the faces of the people he has seen during his shift are blurred or entirely forgotten, the muscle memory remains of intubation, monitoring the vitals, applying pressure or keeping the spine rigid. He feels it in his hands, and the constant knowledge of it would overwhelm him if he didn’t feel a drive to continue. A powerful momentum, as if his career has been careening like a boulder down a hill. Once, he had wanted to be a surgeon, but the thought of cutting into another person’s flesh turns his stomach; he does not so much as flinch at the sight of blood.

There’s a knock at the bathroom door, and Harry gets to his feet and opens it. There stands Henry in the doorway, wearing just a pair of pajama pants and rubbing his eyes blearily. On one side, his hair is pressed to his head like a sad toupee, and on the other, it sticks out in all directions. Harry smiles at the sight, and then his expression falls as he realizes he has likely woken Henry up.

“You didn’t wake me,” Henry assures him before he can even start to apologize. “Just woke up, myself. When I heard the shower going, I thought I might tell you welcome home.”

He finishes scrubbing at his face, giving Harry a sheepish once-over.

“Suppose I should’ve given you more time.”

“Not at all, no,” Harry laughs, running a hand down his own face, looking for a molecule of wakefulness. “I was going to get around to undressing, I only needed a moment to think beforehand.”

At that, Henry looks concerned, and he cocks his head incrementally, reminding Harry that there is no man dearer to him.

“What sort of thinking?” asks Henry, probably figuring that something must have gone badly on Harry’s shift. “You don’t have to think in quiet, or alone.”

“I’m alright, Henry,” Harry replies, and, finding his hand, gives it a squeeze for good measure. “I’m not out of the ordinary, at any rate. Thank you.”

Henry does not look entirely convinced, but seems to decide Harry seems well enough not to press the issue. Even then, it would be more trouble trying to figure out where to start pulling at the tangled ball of yarn that is Harry’s mind-- and hair-- than he is willing to take on just after getting back, with less than an hour’s worth of distance between himself and the end of his shift. And it’s nothing Henry hasn’t heard before, in bits and pieces.

“I’ll leave you to it?” Henry asks, straightening up and making to leave. Harry hums.

“Only if you wish,” he says, and then adds, “I can’t trust myself not to slip and crack my head,” as if that’s the only benefit of having company.

“If that’s the case, why don’t you sit?”

“In the shower?”

He must be more tired than he thought, because Henry quirks a smile and shakes his head.

“I meant in the tub, so that I could run you a bath,” he corrects Harry gently. “You don’t have to worry about falling when you’re not standing in the first place.”

Which is a far better idea than any Harry can string together at the moment, the most coherent of which are _hug Henry_ and _close eyes immediately._ He feels himself nodding, though he doesn’t recall making the conscious choice to do so; perhaps his body is making the command decision to accept Henry’s offer of a bath. Either way, two seconds later finds Henry stopping the tub and switching the shower to a bath and Harry peeling clothes off of his own body so lethargically that Henry has to help him unbutton his shirt, Harry’s fingers having gone gummy and uncoordinated. He’s always so tired when he gets home, but it makes the relief of showering and getting into bed all that much keener. Through the thick fog of exhaustion that clouds his senses, he feels a pressure he recognizes as lips against the crown of his head.

“You’re dead on your feet,” Henry remarks as he strips Harry of the last of his clothes.

“I didn’t realize how tired I had gotten until I stepped inside,” says Harry. “I was awake enough for the ride home, at least.”

Another kiss to his hair, and then Henry keeps an arm around Harry on the way to the tub, more for Henry’s own benefit than Harry’s. After all, when Harry is away from Henry, that also means that Henry has been away from Harry. They are free to make up for that absence now.

Harry bathes, which is to say, Henry scrubs him well with soap and washes his hair for him while Harry sits in the water and tries his damnedest not to fall asleep right then and there. He hangs his head as Henry towels his hair dry for him, and then he has at least enough wherewithal to towel the rest of himself and dress for bed. If he leans into Henry’s side on the way to their room, he has the excuse of having just gotten off a forty-eight hour shift, but finds little point in evading the truth: that Henry makes him feel safe and comfortable in a beautiful way.

When they climb into bed, they fit themselves around each other until it’s not clear who is holding who. Harry falls asleep with his lips against Henry’s cheek.

* * *

Today, Harry has the rare privilege of being home and awake already when Henry returns from work. Even rarer is that it’s hardly even what can be called evening yet-- Henry is home early. That in and of itself is enough to have Harry poking his head out of the kitchen, where he’s keeping an eye on the kettle while neck-deep in a Wikipedia rabbit hole. Heavy footfalls, with little care with regard to the noise they cause, make a beeline for the bathroom.

“Henry?” he asks, stowing his phone in his pocket, making to follow, doubling back as he remembers to turn off the burner, and then hurrying to catch up to Henry as the bathroom door closes. Henry must be sick, is his first thought. Coming home early like this-- only three or four hours since lunchtime, depending on when Henry had a chance to get a bit to eat, perhaps something’s gone wrong with either his food or the way his stomach handles it.

“Henry?” he tries again, through the door. “Are- is everything alright, are you feeling ill at all?”

Nothing in reply, but for the sound of Henry unzipping his jacket and struggling out of it. Harry purses his lips, furrows his brow.

“The thermometer should be in the medicine cabinet. If you’re feeling feverish, that is.”

He stands outside the door patiently for a moment longer, waiting for a response of any sort, or, failing that, some sign that he should enter uninvited. None come, even after seconds, and just as he casts a mournful glance down the hall and starts to turn away, the door rushes open, and there is Henry, naked and wild-eyed.

The sight of him stops Harry in his tracks. For a moment, both of them stare at each other, Henry’s expression unreadable, but frantic, and Harry’s imploringly worried. Behind Henry, he can see the pile of his clothes, thrown to the floor as if discarded in a hurry; his shoes, his socks, his underwear, everything lying on the raft of his coveralls. _Henry,_ reads his embroidered nametag.

"I was at work. Under the chassis-- fixing the suspension, the car rode roughly and made a terrible grinding noise, depending on the speed. Besides that, it was leaking oil into a puddle on the floor. If it wasn’t for the creeper, my back would’ve been drenched."

Henry's head twitches, turning towards the pile of clothing for a fraction of a second before jerking back, his nose wrinkled, and he continues.

“I don’t know why it happened,” he confesses, with the face of someone telling a ghost story. “All my working life, I’ve been able to deal with this. You washed old oil out of my hair before. I think I even made jokes about it, that it would help my curls. But today, something-”

He cuts himself off abruptly. Harry waits for him to go on, and raises his eyebrows with another nod, but Henry’s face goes pinched, as if he’s taken a bite of something rancid.

“Something was different today?” Harry asks, to which Henry opens his eyes and looks around, upwards, in the way people do when they are either trying to find the correct words with which to describe something or trying not to cry. In Henry’s case, it may as well be either, or both, for the way his eyes water.

“I can’t even describe it,” Henry goes on. “The way the grease smelled was like… it was like the sight of a corpse to the eyes. It didn’t smell like part of the shop. It smelled dead, rotting. And then the whole shop smelled dead, and I… I had… I had to-”

“To be home,” Harry finishes for him. Henry makes a choked-off noise. Words have failed him, but the haunted look remains, freezing him in place in the doorway. His shoulders have solidified into a tense bar, one arm anchored to the wall and the other to the handle of the door, which is still turned the farthest it can rotate. His chest heaves erratically, as if he has just come up from the depths and is gasping for any air he can get, though Harry has always known him as someone incapable of willingly submerging his head under water. Harry holds up his hands placatingly, and then rests them on Henry’s shoulders. Miraculously, the tension starts to abate, and the strong arms relax enough to let the door handle roll back.

“Would you like me to run you a bath?” Harry asks, before quickly adding, “Or a shower, if you would prefer. But a bath would allow you to recline, and I could wash your hair again, like with the oil.”

Henry’s mouth pulls strangely; Harry can at least recognize it as something on its way to humor, if not entirely there yet.

“Like with the oil,” he echoes. “That would- yes. Thanks.”

“Of course,” Harry replies, and presses his hand to Henry’s cheek with a smile still soft with concern, one that is returned as Henry draws in a great, shaking breath. Together, they steer each other into the bathroom and Harry scoots the pile of clothes out before closing the door, locking the bad out and the good in. As Harry sits on the edge of the tub and starts the water, Henry sits next to him, farther from the tap, their bodies pressed arm to arm and hip to thigh. The sigh of the faucet almost disguises Henry’s own, but for how his chest rises and falls, and his shoulders lose the last traces of their tension. It takes energy, being that scared-- Harry knows this from both an academic standpoint and from personal experience. The fact that he has a partner who knows firsthand what it feels like, your whole body seizing up as if pressed on all sides by doom thick as tar, is something he is grateful for, and hopes that his efforts can instill a modicum of that same comfort.

“I’m glad I was home,” Harry says softly, letting the water run over his fingers and adjusting the temperature so that the too-hot would even out the too-cold.

“That was one of the reasons I left at all,” Henry admits, his voice equally as low. “If I was sure you weren’t going to be here when I came back, I wouldn’t’ve come back when I did. I might’ve stayed the rest of the day, trying not to shake myself apart.”

As if to illustrate, he shakes, once, a full-body motion that nearly nudges Harry off balance.

“Well, I’m glad you didn’t,” he replies, the thought of Henry forcing himself to stay working through what might have been a panic attack, or something similar enough that it didn’t bear agonizing over the particulars, sitting poorly with him. Given the choice between an empty home and a shop that strikes him with fear, but is at least populated, Henry will always gravitate towards company, despite whatever other troubles there may be. He seeks comfort from people, who can , at the very least, show him through living and thinking and breathing that his fears are survivable.

At last, the tub is decently full. Harry helps Henry maneuver into the tub, boneless as he is, and he relaxes in the warm water, letting his head rest back against the wall behind him. The water rises with his added volume, covering his chest, the thick patch of hair there drifting like seaweed. Harry leans over, kisses his forehead. Brushes his unruly hair away from his face and admires, with relief, how untroubled he looks now, eyes closed, brow smooth but for the fading crease left by his worry. There is the barest trace of a smile on his lips, the kind of small that means he knows he doesn’t have to smile widely for it to be recognized. Harry coaxes his head up and back, and Henry lets him pour a cupped hand of water over his hair, making sure it doesn’t run in the unintended direction and into Henry’s eyes.

Slowly, the scent of oil and grease and other car and boat parts Harry couldn’t identify if his life depended on it fades away, replaced with soap and water. As Harry rinses the last of the shampoo from Henry’s hair, he touches Henry’s cheek, and Henry opens one eye, then the other.

“You’re clean, Henry,” Harry pronounces, smoothing Henry’s hair back. “Clean.”

**Author's Note:**

> just realized that collins is shirtless during this entire fic. at no point is he seen wearing a shirt (though he is implied to have one on at one point.)  
> catch me at [harrydsgoodsir](http://harrydsgoodsir.tumblr.com) (i finally have a canon url!)


End file.
